The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, NCDC, on Friday night announced that a total of 222 suspected yellow fever cases, 76 deaths have been recorded in three states of the federation in the last 11 days. According to a situation report released by the Centre on the disease, the cases occurred in three states of Bauchi, Enugu and Delta states between the 1st and 11th of November, 2020. According to the report, 19 cases have also been confirmed as Yellow fever in the three states.
The report states that on the 1st, 2nd, and 8th of November, clusters of cases and deaths were reported to NCDC by the State Epidemiologists of Delta, Enugu, and Bauchi States respectively. “Seventy- four suspected cases with 35 deaths were reported from Delta State; 70 suspected cases with 33 deaths from Enugu State and 78 suspected cases with 8 deaths from Bauchi state.” The report further explained that from the preliminary investigations, three samples from Delta on the 6th of November, one sample from Enugu (6th November), and eight samples from Bauchi (8th November) were confirmed as yellow fever with PCR at the NCDC National Reference Laboratory, Gaduwa. “Between the 1st and 11th of November 2020, a total of 222 suspected cases, 19 confirmed cases and 76 deaths have been reported from these three states.”
The Centre stated that most of the cases were males, with age ranging from 1-55 years and presented with fever, headache, fatigue, jaundice, abdominal pain, vomiting with or without blood, epistaxis, blood in stools/urine, convulsion, and unconsciousness. The Centre also announced that the National Yellow fever Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) has been activated to coordinate response activities across all affected states while the State Epidemiology Team in the affected states were said to be leading the response with support from NCDC, National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA) and WHO, and National RRTs from NCDC have been deployed to support response activities in Delta and Enugu States As at epi-week 41 this year, Nigeria has reported a total of eight confirmed cases of yellow fever from 7 LGAs across 4 states with no death among confirmed cases.